We are pleased to announce that IBM Cognos BI, one of the leaders in the business intelligence (BI) space, is now part of TEC’s certified BI applications family of products, and is available for evaluation online in TEC’s Business Intelligence and Data Management Evaluation Center. Read the rest of this entry »

The Israeli software provider InsFocus Systems, producer of Insfocus Plus, a business intelligence (BI) solution targeted at the insurance industry, has recently released version 2.0 of its BI application, which includes several enhancements, with special emphasis on the Web. Read the rest of this entry »

Sporting a brand new stock symbol (NYSE: DATA), Tableau Software, the Seattle-based analytics and visualization software provider announced the pricing of its initial public offering of its 8.2 million Class A shares. At a public price of $31 per share, 5 million shares are being offered by Tableau Software and 3.2 million shares are being offered by other selling stockholders. Acting as lead joint book-running managers for the offering are Goldman, Sachs & Co and Morgan Stanley & CO, with other important financial organizations also involved. Read the rest of this entry »

SAP is undergoing a makeover with some structural changes to certain segments of its extensive software portfolio. Just before its annual SAPPHIRE conference, SAP re-baptized its Visual Intelligence product as SAP Lumira, its new data analytics offering. Read the rest of this entry »

The “little” SAP Business One solution is an unsung hero of sorts at SAP. Indeed, more than 38,000 customers worldwide in nearly 30 languages and over 630 partners are often ignored as less newsworthy by market observers. The business management solution for small businesses (with 10–20 users, on average) can be deployed on premises or in the cloud, and is accessible via mobile devices.

During the SAPPHIRENOW 2013 conference, SAP announced the general availability of the 9.0 version of the SAP Business One running on Microsoft SQL Server (which is the product’s original database). With more than 50 new features, the latest version offers enhanced capabilities for warehouse management, infrastructure, and inventory management, as well as improved systems performance.

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Apriso, a provider of global manufacturing software solutions, has introduced a Packaging Solution for Global Manufacturers to better manage complex packaging operations and conversion processes. Manufacturers in the consumer goods, food and beverage, and consumer electronics industries who implement this solution should have up-to-the-minute visibility into and control over plant floor systems, processes, and performance to enable better informed decisions and respond faster to change with accuracy, while still retaining the operations intelligence necessary for world-class product traceability and regulatory compliance adherence.

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Modern organizations know that they need more than visualization. Modern visualization should enable users to collect accurate, coherent, related and relevant data all within an effective visual frame.

VisionWaves is a software provider that has developed tools of this sort aiming to help users visualize and understand what is happening and how it relates to important business areas, thereby achieving a comprehensive view of their business. Beyond monitoring their organization from a data perspective, VisionWaves’ complete business cockpit enables users to connect the dots between data, processes, and people. Read the rest of this entry »

At the recently held Inforum 2013 conference, many ears pricked up at the announcement of Infor Sky Vault, a big data initiative that leverages Infor’s ION middleware, micro-vertical expertise, and visually appealing dashboards developed by Infor ION business intelligence (BI) experts and designed by Hook & Loop, Infor’s recently incubated Manhattan-based in-house design agency. Infor Sky Vault is planned to launch in the second half of 2013 with predefined content for sales finance, and production. Additional functional areas and industries will be added in subsequent iterations.

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The slew of product announcements at the recent Inforum 2013 conference was underlined by the announced general availability of Infor 10x, an enterprise release that in Infor’s view marks a major step forward in achieving its vision. Infor 10x unites a multi-purpose middleware platform featuring social, mobile, analytical, and cloud capabilities with Infor’s suite of solutions.

All major applications feature a reinvented HTML5 user experience, the new Infor Ming.le platform for social collaboration, business process improvement, and contextual analytics, and pervasive in-context analytics embedded throughout workflows that are packaged within the Infor ION integration framework for managing business process flows, workflows, and alerts. Read the rest of this entry »

For a long time, PROS Inc. was a prominent pricing management software provider for both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) industries. Lately, however, the vendor has been leveraging its decades-long experience in handling large volumes of data to provide big data applications for sales effectiveness (pricing being only a part thereof). In other words, PROS now delivers prescriptive analytics and data science to help customers identify sales opportunities, develop offers, and set prices.

PROS has announced that it has signed an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) agreement with SAP to embed the SAP HANA platform with its big data apps. SAP HANA is a real-time in-memory database platform that streamlines analytics, planning, predictive, and sentiment assessments to allow business to operate in real time.

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Retailers are vital to the global economy, responsible for 18 percent of the US GDP while supporting more than 41 million jobs in the US alone. It’s no secret that Microsoft Dynamics AX has marked retail as one of its focus industries, and early in 2013 Microsoft announced the latest release of Microsoft Dynamics AX for Retail that offers new capabilities to help retailers deliver a complete shopping experience through search-based e-commerce, new point of sale (POS) capabilities, and an omni-channel commerce engine.

But many important functional pieces will still have to be delivered by partners. Most recently, EdgeAX, a unit of Visionet Systems, Inc., announced the general availability of its apparel product lifecycle management (PLM) solution that is embedded in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 and harnesses the underlying technology.

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Webdetails, a long time partner of Pentaho, is a Portugal-based consulting firm dedicated to providing expert consultancy and development of visual interfaces using Pentaho’s native business intelligence (BI) environments.

Pentaho has completed the acquisition of Webdetails, with the aim of improving Pentaho’s user and visual experience capabilities and reinforcing its development community for the benefit of new and existing customers. Read the rest of this entry »

Apriso, a provider of global manufacturing software solutions that has recently celebrated its 20th birthday, announced the launch of Apriso Global EMI (Enterprise Manufacturing Intelligence) solution—that provides a truly global and consistent platform. The solution gathers and reports up-to-the-minute information—wherever and whenever it is needed across an enterprise—tailored and presented in a way that is right for each individual decision maker.

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While some analysts may question the true revenue figure that can be attributed solely to SAP HANA (i.e., whether SAP is intentionally crediting HANA with revenues that might be attributable to other SAP offerings), the fact remains that businesses have currently only just scratched the surface of SAP HANA’s potential. For example, SAP recently announced that HANA would underpin new releases of manufacturing solutions as well as updates for existing solutions covering engineering, manufacturing, and sustainable operations. The announcement was made at Hannover Messe 2013, held April 8-12 in Hannover, Germany.

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While SAP has lately given huge publicity to in-memory computing via its incessant promotion of SAP HANA, the technology has been around since the late 1990s, and there are currently over 50 software vendors delivering such proven solutions. Most recently, during the COLLABORATE ’13 Oracle Applications User Group (OAUG) conference, Oracle announced new Oracle In-Memory Applications for Oracle Engineered Systems, leveraging dynamic random access memory (DRAM), flash memories, and the near zero latency InfiniBand network fabric to run ten to twenty times faster than commodity hardware. These tools can achieve these impressive speeds by transforming batch processing to real-time and shortening response time with improved user interface (UI) rendering.

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